All dissertations should be this much fun. (35 photos and illustrations)
An amusing compilation of deceptions dating from the Middle Ages to the aftermath of September 11, morphed into print from a Web site initially created to store the author’s thesis research.
Boese, a grad student at UC San Diego, defines a hoax as a “deliberately deceptive act that has succeeded in capturing the attention (and, ideally, the imagination) of the public.” Included under this broad heading are the Jackalope, a species of antlered rabbit able to mimic human voices; a South African crop circle made by extraterrestrials that featured the BMW logo; and Snowball, the 87-pound kitten whose size was due to its mother having been callously abandoned near a nuclear lab. Actually, Snowball wasn’t intended as a hoax; the cat’s owner manipulated the photo and sent a few friends the image, which eventually made its way around the world with an accompanying narrative. (Boese similarly stretches his own definition to include Orson Welles’s radio broadcast The War of the Worlds, even though the program wasn’t meant to trick listeners.) The author believes that while folks have always been gullible, the form and function of hoaxes change over time. For example, during the 1990s, people began to feel anxious about how technology and the Internet were affecting their daily lives. This anxiety fueled the success of a 1994 hoax in PC Computing magazine, which published an article “reporting” that Congress would soon make it illegal to drive drunk on “the information highway.” When a 1998 Internet posting by a New Mexico physicist claimed that the Alabama legislature had voted to change the mathematical value of pi from 3.14159 . . . to “the Biblical value” of 3.0, a bewildered legislature was swamped with calls from angry citizens. Despite its origin as thesis material, the work is not meant to be academic, and there is no analysis of any kind.
All dissertations should be this much fun. (35 photos and illustrations)Pub Date: Nov. 11, 2002
ISBN: 0-525-94678-0
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Dutton
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2002
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Not as engaging as the author’s bio of Andre the Giant, but his uncluttered drawings suit his straightforward argument.
A graphic history of marijuana and how bad science and bad laws resulted in demonizing a substance that the author feels offers far greater benefits than its minimal risks of harm.
An artist who analyzes with the same broad strokes that mark his drawings, Brown (Is This Guy for Real?: The Unbelievable Andy Kaufman, 2018, etc.) takes readers on a journey mixing myth and history, from Vishnu and Shiva and the introduction of the cannabis plant to India through the spreading of hemp all over the globe to the racial and ethnic biases that fueled the criminalization of “Satan’s Seed” in America. Though legitimate science and medicine failed to find any significant danger in the use of the drug, repressive forces—the law, the church, the press—succeeded in the public opinion campaigns, depicting it as a scourge that contaminated society. Claimed one study based on spurious science titled “Marihuana Menace,” “the dominant race, whites, are at the height of culture and those countries that consume marijuana have deteriorated.” “Those countries included Mexico, where the plant proliferated and consumption crossed the border into Texas, as El Paso enacted the first law making cannabis illegal a century ago. The statute served as an anti-immigration weapon, and marijuana became associated with minorities as well as jazz musicians and those who enjoyed the music. The rest is history, as both the use of marijuana and the criminal penalties escalated exponentially, and the conservative presidencies of Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan sustained a war on drugs. “At the dawn of the 1980s over 400,000 people per year were being arrested for cannabis,” writes the author, “with blacks and other minority groups being arrested in far greater numbers than whites.” The pendulum has since swung toward decriminalization and legalization, making much of what is recounted here seem like reefer madness in retrospect.
Not as engaging as the author’s bio of Andre the Giant, but his uncluttered drawings suit his straightforward argument.Pub Date: April 2, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-250-15408-8
Page Count: 256
Publisher: First Second
Review Posted Online: March 17, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2019
A catharsis for the author that fits perfectly within a pivotal period for society and culture at large.
One day’s commute offers time for the author to reflect on sexual predators, alcoholism, and the experiences she understands better now than she did at the time.
New York City–based writer and illustrator Williams (co-author: The Big Activity Book for Anxious People, 2019, etc.) presents a graphic memoir that female readers will find galvanizing and male readers should find illuminating. She explains early on that her reading on the commuter train is restricted to female authors: “I don’t read books by men because I feel sufficiently well-versed in the human male experience from my education.” The lessons were hard earned, and some were slowly learned, since the author’s perspective as a sober mother in recovery is very different than it was when she was experiencing sexual encounters as a blackout alcoholic. “Blackouts,” she writes, “are euphoric, quiet, twilight birth....It’s absolute, perfect freedom. So bring strangers home, because in this sacred darkness, intimacy is not a threat, it’s a compulsion. The dark has you covered.” Williams long felt some shame of complicity in what she now recognizes as outright rape, and she sees clarity in even murkier situations: “The yes or no of consent is not what separates mutual desire from predation,” she writes. “The game is rigged; all the power is concentrated on the other side. We are groomed for compliance.” Most pages are a single panel and self-contained, a series of reflections and impressions intercut with memories, as the woman on the page feels outnumbered by the men who sit too close to her, stare at her, or intrude upon her. Within her caricatures, she wonders which might be rapists and which might be rescuers. Over the course of the day, she reflects on her recovery, how the strong support of other women helped awaken her to a new life, and how their encouragement spawned this graphic, candid, courageous memoir.
A catharsis for the author that fits perfectly within a pivotal period for society and culture at large.Pub Date: Oct. 8, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-4197-3674-2
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Abrams ComicArts
Review Posted Online: July 2, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
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